Some economists have been relying on bogus population data
cambridge.org
cambridge.org
Papua New Guinea’s population was significantly larger than thought - closer to 18 million than 9 million. (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507443/amp/Papua-...)
Suffice to say, this is a problem us Economic Historians and many other social scientists have been aware of for some time.
Seriously the fraction of papers in which you see these data used is in my personal experience 0. As a fraction of the total amount of economics research produced annually is probably 10^-6 or smaller. It just isn’t necessary in 99.99999% of papers to make any reference to any national or regional populations 2,000 years ago or more.
Also maybe ask the authors of these papers how seriously they take the estimates OR how much weight they ask the estimates to bear in their papers?? “Not very” and “not much” are the most likely answers.
This seems to have some educational value to some (economics) authors that rely too much on the fact population is known, but there are many bad assumptions done in many papers, so doubt this (some researchers relying too much on inexact data) is such an outlier.
But it's also not as relevant or surprising as it sounds, since the numerator of those fractions is also guesswork. They're not dividing accurate figures for the total wealth of European countries to get an inaccurate estimate of how rich the "average" person was, they're actually tending to work the opposite way from scant data on wages, prices and what "average" people owned multiplied by scant data on population to get a wealth of the nation figure[2]. Needless to say, there's a lot of margin for error subjectivity and scope for the introduction of personal biases in those estimates too (not to mention the inequalities and completely different access to stuff that makes adjusting for purchasing power and comparing the wealth of Inca subjects, the average medieval Englishman, the average modern Equatorial Guinean and the average modern Briton from a single GDP per capita PPP metric pretty dubious)
Essentially no economic theory (as opposed to economic history) depends on the accuracy pre-Industrial Revolution time series for inspiration or validation, and if you double the values for the period before the exponential growth curve, you still get an exponential growth curve.
[1]except to the extent that the figures were guesstimated based on the consensus of historians that country X is much richer than country Y
[2] cf modern Nigeria, where we have reasonably accurate census data and an "oops, using our new method of calculating GDP, it seems to have doubled previous estimates"
Some economies, like New Zealand/Aeoteoroa were not populated until 1200/1300 CE which would be interesting to see in the stats. Other economies populated as translocation/transmigration of the population of other places wholesale. Indonesia had this, at scale. Millions of people moving. Hong Kong. 1949 partition in India caused massive shifts between two economies. Do we discount this happening in past times?
Estimates of population based on the number of individuals reported killed in battle would be very culturally informed. I have no idea how many camp followers a hoarde has, facing off the Roman army in Farther Gaul or Spain. How do you estimate population under migratory communities in steppes, or climate change effects in northern Europe?
It feels very guesswork-y
I liked the circularity reference. Easy to buttress yourself in a chain of references to peer review legitemacy, so economy estimates inform population and vice versa? use economic indicators when you don't have pop stats and don't ask too many questions where they came from!
If you must use the new name, at least make the effort to spell it correclty
Also s/correclty/correctly/g
Data Gathering is hard.
At some point all data is an estimate.
It was not all some blur, just because they didn't have modernity-style institutions.
It's hard to understand that from our perspective, but bringing the current notion of a nation or a nation state into 16th century is an anachronism.
Reminds me of biology and evolution - biology isn't designed it just evolves based on observable properties of systems.
For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods?
And that's even assuming there _is_ a census. The Domesday Book was quite exceptional a thousand years ago, and even that only gives us a population estimate between 1.2 and 1.6 million (see Wikipedia). Any place with a poorer census or written record (i.e most of the world at the time) would be even more of a guesswork.
Even more importantly, who is writing. Julius Caesar defeating seven bajillion Gauls is not a figure that should be taken at face value if the source of that number is Julius Caesar.
Is there any reason whatsoever to NOT count slaves and babies as persons? You can not count them as citizens or adults, but surely they are persons.
Remember that not that long ago at this scale, the USA considered slaves as 3/5 of a person when determining states' populations for representation and taxation purposes.
For example, the original Roman census, from which we take word 'census', registered and counted adult male citizens. They did list their wife, children and slaves as part of extra information about their household, but those dependents weren't part of the census itself, just an "attachment" to the recorded citizen just as the notes about their land and other porperty. Other people like single women or orphans would get reported by their guardians, but they as well explicitly weren't included in the "count of heads", which counts only adult male citizens i.e. those who can run households and own property, be recruited to fight, pay taxes, and vote.
In effect, the ancient world doesn't really consider persons or individuals, they care about households (represented by a single individual) and so register and count those.
I've taken a crack at revising the title, though not a very good crack - it's better to use language from the article itself and I didn't do that in this case. If anyone wants to comb through the article and find a representative phrase that would be more suitable, we'll happily edit it again.
Econ papers vary widely in quality. The lack of a quantifier could be taken to mean this is the new unrepresentative lab rats.
"Widely used historical population time series mostly guesswork" would be a more accurate title, though you might get a few "water is wet" replies :)
A better title:
Economist points out some economists had been using a dodgy source; cites other economists who had pointed this out adding to literature of checking citations and a growing body of literature on checking claims in economic history in particular [editorial: as these feed into pop science years down the road]
* some papers rely on McEvedy and Jones’ Atlas of World Population History data as the ground truth, when a lot of it is the best educated guess (sometimes the guess is based on basically almost nothing).
* the difference between the "guessed" population and the real population (which do not observe) is not random, which would lead not only to less precise results but also to bias.
The Federal Reserve lies, and the economists continue to trust their every word.
My theory is that the deep state needs control of the currency, so they specifically put economists that teach the necessity of the Federal Reserve.
I highly recommend reading some of AE Housmann’s prose. He lays out a vision of _English Literature_ that intellectually rigorous.
This is ofuscatory, twice:
1. One could argue anything
2. presence of settlements is an indicator of political organisation, but political organisation is not a requirement for settlements
I disagree. People living next to each other need to reach a political order (organisation) even if it is tacit. A common understanding of a shared living space where you can trust your neighbour to not try to steal you or enslave you is a form of political organisation, even if no interaction between the settlers ever occur. Likewise, a settlement where the strongest people enslave the others is also a political organisation. Also, seasonal settlements where people only spend a few weeks a year also require political organisations to coordinate on the dates and logistics.
Monarchy and anarchy are forms of political organisation, just like families, unions and corporations.
I would agree if we were talking about _Institutionalised_ political organisation, but this statement would still be wrong:
> In terms of proof of political organization, that requires evidence like writing or inscriptions.
Other forms of evidence can prove institutionalised politics. For instance, the presence of shared infrastructure, palaces, temples, monuments, royal funerary sites, battles, etc.
George and Lenny had an agreement and social relationship, but does that count as "political order"? (-:
Do you recognize Palestine? Northern Cyprus?
Are the People's Republic of China and Taiwan two different countries?
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea does not recognize the Republic of Korea as an independent country, and vice versa. Do you?
What about the Sovereign Military Order of Malta? The Republic of Kosovo?
Under your definition, is Wales a country? What about Northern Ireland? Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdo...
> Since 1922 the United Kingdom has been made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales (which collectively make up Great Britain) and Northern Ireland (variously described as a country,[1] province,[2][3][4][5] jurisdiction[6] or region[7][8]). The UK Prime Minister's website has used the phrase "countries within a country" to describe the United Kingdom.[9] Some statistical summaries, such as those for the twelve NUTS 1 regions of the UK, refer to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as "regions".[10][11] With regard to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales particularly, the descriptive name one uses "can be controversial, with the choice often revealing one's political preferences".
What about the Isle of Man? It's not part of the UK, but is a self-governing possession of the British Crown.
[0] https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsc...
Quantification of uncertainty is bread and butter for us! Criticize the field fo relying on null hypothesis significance testing, not for failing to provide measures of uncertainty!!
But yeah, I hope it's just a simplification for laymen like me. But the fact that apparently there weren't errors bars in a dataset so important such as population estimatives doesn't give me the right impression
"One of Britain's forgotten issues is that the government does not know who is currently in the United Kingdom, in any sense."
True if one ignoring the census, or the many registers, national and regional, the 1 surveillence camera for every 10 people watching over us or the many corporate holders of everything from your physical location to your browsing history that they are compelled to report to the UK government.
Agree that the account is sus, starting from the anime pfp.
It is however trivial to correlate - if there was a desire (or significant error) deemed it to be so.
Of course basing your population estimate off the number of tax returns would "leave out some people" (>90% of the population of the uk for that example). Likewise basing it off the register of all children in schools would ignore most people over the age of 18.
Ultiately the issue is that these people claim is rife is - all these undocumented people are getting all the jobs, benefits, healthcare, housing, government grants and school places which ignores the fact that to get any of those you have to be documented and registered on a myriad of systems to access that.
This is correct. There are people operating outside of all of those - there was a number of illegal schools in Birmingham that OFSTED spotted and shut down - but to get into the legal system and especially to claim money you need identification.
The census is meant to be the single source of truth from which all other population-related metrics are derived, but since it only comes around once every 10 years it's usually out of date. In practice you always need a bunch of fudge factors to account for population growth, immigration, emigration, people moving around, etc in the years since the last census was taken. And that's not even accounting for tourists and so on. I've seen how this sausage is made; you just get used to the idea that the census info is merely a rough guess that you have to finesse until the numbers look reasonable. Those fudge factors are themselves often taken from ONS projections. So if the ONS itself has a small systematic undercount because of an overly-optimistic methodology, that poisons all calculations downstream.
As for the registers: the point in that thread is that the registers disagree with each other. Covid-era NHS patient counts, for example, because it's obviously in people's interest to get healthcare in the way it isn't to fill out a census form. EU settlement applications is another one.
Surveillance cameras: do you know what the "CC" in "CCTV" means? It's not all fed into a giant database. There's nobody combing through all that video and counting how many people are there. In almost all cases the data is retained for a few days and then gets destroyed with no human eye ever looking at them.
For all the talk of mass surveillance, there is still an enormous world that lives hidden outside the notice of the state. You only see the outlines of it during unusual events like Covid or Grenfell, like a lightning bolt suddenly illuminating the landscape for a split second. There were dozens and dozens of people living in that tower that the local authority had no idea existed. We only know about it because it went up in flames -- it can't be unique.
Old title about 200 years claim: While the Middle East, Egypt, and Greece contain the longest continuously occupied cities, the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries. And few continuous civilizations survive in any meaningful form for more than 250 years / 10 generations on average.
Changed yes. "Lost generational memory" why? If you mean "lost direct memory of 2 or 3 millenia ago" sure.
Economics isnt a science, its an orthodoxy of rules and beliefs.
Sure there are some correlations that hit true, but outside a few true-isms, its basically a religion.
That means that, as much as they try to stuff it with math, economics remains fundamentally an application of loose sociologic principles, which are themselves extremely debatable.
The genius is that that bit of casual math instantly insulate economists from their peers (i.e. historians, sociologists, etc), no matter how bogus such math might be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution
[1] https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v110y2020i5p1572-1602.h...
The economic literature abounds in observational studies that test economic theories. What are you basing your statement on?
Economies in video games fascinate me, because it's another 'world' where you can see whether some economics principles apply or not. Eg the game Path of Exile doesn't have 'money', but various crafting materials ended up being treated as money by the players. The exchange rates between them are set by supply and demand as well.
Even game theory sits on top of the throne of "rational actors", meanwhile human beings are explicitly IRRATIONAL actors.
If economics was a functional science, the richest people in the world would be economists. That it isn't is strong evidence that no economics yet has produced strong predictions, which is a rather significant problem for a "science".
You have to define greed very broadly to make this statement true. Broadly enough that you should tell people to discard any negative connotations of the word when interpreting what you're saying.
I work for money I can spend; that's greed only in the sense that I choose what I do and I get rewarded for it, as opposed to working to avoid being whipped or killed or sent to Siberia or to hell. Self-interest is so far the best motivation we've come up with.